The Community Café: Creating And . - OER Knowledge Cloud
Peer Reviewed PapersThe Community Café:creating and sharing openeducational resources withcommunity-based languageteachersKate Borthwick, Alison DickensUniversity of Southampton, UKThe Community Café project ran from 2010 – 2011 and was a collaborationbetween Southampton City Council and two universities in the UK. Theproject’s aim was to create, publish online and share a collection of openaccess digital resources for community-based language teachers in theSouthampton area. The project addressed a particular problem: the scarcityof up-to-date, online resources for community languages. These languages areoften learnt in informal situations, and teachers are often reliant on creatingtheir own materials but have limited access to training. Engaging with openpractice offers this group the potential benefits of improving their access toresources, enhancing digital literacy and practice, and gaining insights intoalternative pedagogical approaches through using existing online repositories.The project used a mix of informal ‘café’ sessions and formal training tosuccessfully engage the local community languages group in creating andsharing OERs. The group reported that there were real benefits to theirfor citations:Borthwick K., Dickens A. (2013), The Community Café: creating and sharing open educationalresources with community-based language teachers, Journal of e-Learning and Knowledge Society,v.9, n.1, 73-83. ISSN: 1826-6223, e-ISSN:1971-8829 Journal of e-Learning and Knowledge SocietyVol. 9, n. 1, January 2013 (pp. 73 - 83)ISSN: 1826-6223 eISSN: 1971-8829
Peer Reviewed Papers- Vol. 9, n. 1, January 2013pedagogical practice through working on the project and engaging with open practice: knowledgeand skills gained continue to inform their teaching. The paper concludes that while community-basedlanguages teachers are enthusiastic learners and benefits of open practice can be significant, they needencouragement, training and a neutral environment to engage fully with the open movement.1 Introduction and backgroundThis article describes the Community Café project, which ran from 2010to 2011 and was a collaboration between Southampton City Council, the University of Southampton and Manchester Metropolitan University. The projectwas funded by JISC1 to create, publish online and share a collection of digitalresources for community languages teachers in the Southampton area. Forthis project ‘community languages’ were defined as « languages spoken bymembers of minority groups or communities within a majority language context» (CILT)2. The Southampton area, for example, is home to a wide rangeof community languages, including Gujarati, Bengali, Chinese, Afghan Farsi,Persian, Punjabi, Polish and Urdu.Historically, community languages in the UK have been undervalued by society in favour of English and other modern European languages (CILT, 2005)which are seen to have more prestige or usefulness (for example, in gainingaccess to university or opening up job opportunities in the UK and abroad)and the most commonly taught languages in the UK are French, German andSpanish (CILT, 2011). Community languages are often taught in informal,community-based situations (e.g. in the home or in supplementary schools)rather than within the mainstream education system. In recent years qualifications in many community languages have become available, e.g. GCSEs orassessment through the Asset Languages scheme3, for example: in Hampshire,17 such languages are taught by more than 150 teachers to GCSE level. Theacquisition of such skills and qualifications has economic and social benefits,for the individuals, the communities and the UK as a whole (McPake & Sachdev, 2008). In addition, the general benefits of plurilingualism to an individual’seducational and linguistic development have been widely demonstrated (CILT,op. cit).1.1 Issue to be addressedThe professional life of a community-based language teacher is challenging:most teach out of love for their language and culture and have no formal teaThe Joint Information Systems Committee (UK) www.jisc.ac.ukNational Centre for Languages: http://www.cilt.org.uk/community 74
Kate Borthwick, Alison Dickens - The Community Café: creating and sharing open educational resources with community-based language teacherscher training. They often work full-time in professions unrelated to teachingand have family commitments, so they have very little time for preparation,resource development and professional development, despite reporting a strongdesire to improve their practice and enhance their students’ learning experience(McPake et al., 2007). In addition, there is often very little appropriate languagelearning material available for the languages that they teach and what is available is outdated. Their student groups are frequently diverse in age and ability,and so the teachers are constantly required to create their own materials. Thereare a considerable number of community languages teachers working acrossthe UK (ibidem), but few mechanisms for them to share their work, supporteach other or work collaboratively.The project team sought to address these issues and open practice presentedan ideal way to do this. The open content movement emphasises crossingboundaries and engaging with a wider public beyond the established educationsector. It encourages the creation and sharing of teaching resources in openaccess repositories and the use of online networks for sharing good practice(for example, see Borthwick, 2011; Comas-Quinn et al., 2011). One of thecentral tenets in the OER movement is that resources should be licensed toallow re-use and adaptation by others, enabling material to be widely andeffectively used in different contexts (e.g. Mendonça et al., 2011; HewlettFoundation, 2012). The benefits of engaging with the open content movementfor professional development and resource sharing are already well-known inthe Higher Education sector in the UK (JISC, 2012) and are currently beingexplored with enthusiasm in all mainstream educational sectors. These aspectsof open practice aligned strongly with the project’s aim to support a group ofteachers working outside mainstream education in creating and sharing theirown digital materials; widening the pool of resources available, and offeringaccess to a global online teaching community.1.2 Aims and objectivesOur primary aim was to use expertise and tools developed within the higher education sector to collect and co-create digital resources for communitylanguages. There were other objectives: to build a self-managed community-based group to support communitylanguage speakers engaged in teaching; to improve the pedagogy of existing materials through peer review anddiscussion, and encourage general reflective practice; to provide bespoke and incremental training in using, creating, publishing and sharing digital content;75
Peer Reviewed Papers- Vol. 9, n. 1, January 2013 to contribute to the enhancement of the profile and provision of community language learning through adding resources to an online repositoryhosting a wide range of language resources; to open up connections and strengthen existing relationships betweenacademic departments and the local community.2 MethodThe project team made use of the existing Community Languages supportnetwork, coordinated by Southampton City Council, to introduce local teachersto the project. The team employed a mix of informal and formal methods tosuccessfully engage the group in Southampton.2.1 Informal MethodsThe first strand of project activity was to establish regular ‘café-style’ sessions for the teachers, and the project team used a model of community engagement developed as part of an award-winning4 EU-funded project, TheLanguage Café5 to do this. That project responded to a demand for informaland socially-situated language learning and created over 20 Language Cafésacross Europe. The benefit of the Language Café model is in its informal,user-centred nature, an aspect that we felt would be particularly importantfor this project as participants would be likely to lack confidence in using orsharing digital resources, be reluctant to share resources they may feel are notsuitably ‘professional’, or simply reticent about sharing their existing practicewith others outside of their language groups. The intention was that the Cafémeetings would provide a forum for ‘offline’ discussion and would supplementa series of workshops offering training in the use of technology for resourcecreation and sharing.Café sessions were held monthly, at a local school in Southampton. Meetings were necessarily held ‘out-of-hours’ because this was when teacherswere available. Sessions were designed to encourage teachers to have inputinto the shape of future meetings. The project team felt that this was essentialto the success and sustainability of the project, because it was felt that if participants had input into the programme of activities, they would feel a senseof ownership in the project and activities would be directly relevant to themand their teaching.Café meetings had a loose structure involving discussion and ideas/practicesharing. Meetings were led by members of the project team, who typicallyintroduced a theme (e.g. ‘using authentic materials in teaching’) and encou4576European Award for Languages 2008, Lifelong Learning Programmehttp://www.languagecafe.eu
Kate Borthwick, Alison Dickens - The Community Café: creating and sharing open educational resources with community-based language teachersraged participants to mix with new acquaintances across language groupings.Meetings were informal and social in tone. The themes covered in cafe sessionswere chosen to complement the training workshops which ran in parallel, so forexample, prior to a workshop on creating podcasts, the cafe session was usedto talk through ideas about how to use audio recordings in class and the kindsof elements to consider when creating a podcast. This meant that participantswere prepared for the practical workshops.2.2 Formal methodsThe second, parallel strand of activity was to run six evening workshops inthe use of technology over the course of the year. These workshops were heldin a computing classroom on the Southampton university campus and werefacilitated either by the project team or by specifically commissioned trainers.Topics were negotiated with the participants at the outset of the project andfeatured: using and sharing material on an online repository; creating podcasts;using powerpoint for language teaching; creating online activities using HotPotatoes – part 1; creating online activities using Hot Potatoes – part 2; andtips for teaching diverse groups of learners.All workshops were practical and offered all participants the opportunityfor hands-on experience using technology to create materials. This ensuredthat each teacher could work on a resource individually and build up her/hisdigital portfolio. Workshops were also structured around an achievable task:each participant was able to complete a digital item by the end of the workshopand this encouraged a sense of achievement and empowerment in the group(see Figure 1 for an example).77
Peer Reviewed Papers- Vol. 9, n. 1, January 2013Fig. 1 - An audio activity with lesson plan, transcript and translation for Punjabihttp://languagebox.ac.uk/1779/2.3 Online space for sharingAn existing open repository, the LanguageBox6, was used to store the materials created and re-purposed for the project. A key aspect of this repositoryis its simplicity: it is very easy to use and does not represent a barrier fornon-technical individuals. It has an appealing interface and offers some Web2.0-style features such as the facility to comment on others’ resources. LanguageBox was developed in collaboration with language tutors (Borthwicket al., 2009) and contains materials for a wide variety of languages at variouslevels, which provided a source of inspiration for teaching methods and ideasfor learning activities, as well fostering a sense of joining a broader languageteaching community.The LanguageBox also offers a space on the internet to put individuallycreated material where students can access it and use it directly (each resourcehas a unique URL), and this is a tangible benefit for teachers who do not haveaccess to institutional Virtual Learning Environments or websites.3 FindingsAn evaluation was carried out at the close of the project by the project teamand a group of external evaluators from Manchester Metropolitan University.The project was found to have been successful in exciting the enthusiasm678www.languagebox.ac.uk
Kate Borthwick, Alison Dickens - The Community Café: creating and sharing open educational resources with community-based language teachersof a particular community group about creating effective teaching resources,sharing ideas with others and publishing teaching resources openly online. Itsucceeded in enabling a group of teachers to reflect on their own practice, learnand implement new skills, and learn more about how technology can be usedin the language classroom. Tangible achievements included: the creation of a pack of workshop materials which other groups can usein working with community-based language teachers to deliver ICTtraining and to create an informal community group to share teachingideas/practice (this pack is available as an open educational resourcethrough the LanguageBox7); a training method and model for engaging language teachers which empowered and attracted participants and which meant that they werenot intimidated by the technology used or the project’s approach tocommunity-building; a modest bank of resources for the teaching of community languages,published openly and created by community-based language teachersin Hampshire and Manchester; active engagement from locally-based community language teachers- café meetings attracted an average of 30 participants, with about 22attending workshops, and extension workshops in Manchester andPortsmouth were attended by approximately 60 additional teachers.Case study of a Community Café participant:A Hungarian teacher living and working in Southampton“I teach Hungarian on Sundays, to learners aged four-ten years. Students comefrom all over Hampshire, as there are not many Hungarian teachers. I starteddoing it because no-one else was willing and I wanted to preserve some culturalknowledge for my daughter and other Hungarian children. I have two groupsworking on different things during each two-hour class and there are not manysuitable resources available, so you have to be quite creative in finding and making resources. I enjoy it but it is very time-consuming. I usually use my own CDplayer to play songs, etc. and I get students to use the computer for homework.I use the Internet to help me plan lessons. The children are more willing to dothings if they can use computers.The best thing about the project for me has been hearing different experiences - as each teacher has different issues. I have got some teaching ideas fromother colleagues during Café meetings. I have also become familiar with newthings: using PowerPoint, podcasts, Hot Potatoes software. I’m looking forwardto using them.”7http://languagebox.ac.uk/1846/79
Peer Reviewed Papers- Vol. 9, n. 1, January 2013All participants in the project were given a closing questionnaire and interviewed informally about their experiences during the course of the project.There was an overwhelmingly positive response: 100% of those who completedthe survey rated the whole experience at ‘good’ or better, and 84% as ‘excellent.’ Other responses indicated that: The group learnt new skills. All of the participants testified to this, forexample, «I didn’t really think of using computer software before, butI learned that it can really help learning in the classroom.» – (Polishteacher) Meetings were found to be useful in overcoming fear of technology. «[Using technology in teaching] is not as hard as it first seems. It justrequires a lot of planning.» - (Punjabi teacher); «I have grown in confidence in using computers, making my own handouts, and in talkingwith other people about my teaching situation.» – (Urdu teacher) Project activities will have an impact on future teaching. «Sometimes itis difficult to find a good podcast for your lesson. Now I’m able to do iton my own!» – (Hungarian teacher) Sharing resources online is a good idea. «I have found the LanguageBoxto be very useful as inspiration for my own lesson planning because Ican get ideas from other teachers’ lesson plans and from their teachingresources. I have been publishing a series of lesson materials for Polishon the LanguageBox, and I hope to make contact with other Polishteachers in the UK by doing this.» – (Polish teacher) It is beneficial to share ideas with colleagues. «Each teacher has differentissues so it is interesting to hear different experiences. I have got someteaching ideas from other colleagues during café meetings.» – (Hungarian teacher)The external evaluators of the project highlighted the value of sharing resources online and indicated that this could be highly beneficial to other community-based language teachers. They noted that the Community Café modelcould be a cost-effective and appealing way of actively creating useful networkswhich would have the potential to sustain in the longer term.3.1 Lessons learnedIt was immediately evident from contact with the community-based language teachers that they are extremely enthusiastic learners and are not intimidatedby new ideas, approaches and technologies, in keeping with McPake et al.’sfindings (op. cit.). This was a characteristic of all participants in the project80
Kate Borthwick, Alison Dickens - The Community Café: creating and sharing open educational resources with community-based language teachersand meant that training fell on fertile ground. This situation means that smallamounts of training have the potential for a large impact on practice in a waythat can keep costs to a minimum.The team also found that open access can be an ideal vehicle for assistingthe work of community-based language teachers. There is a shortage of existingcommunity languages resources that are appropriate for a UK context. Theproliferation of OER repositories broadens the pool of resources available andspreads good practice. However, in order for such teachers to have access tothe benefits of OERs, further IT training and awareness-raising about OERsis essential, particularly in the area of copyright and the use of third partycontent, as well as effective metadata description for increased discoverabilityof resources.There needs to be greater knowledge transfer between higher education andother sectors such as schools and the supplementary schools sector to enablesuch community-based language teachers to reflect upon and improve their ownpractice, and engage with open access freely. In the higher education sector,practitioners are constantly involved in reflection and criticism of their practiceand it is also a part of mainstream educational practice in schools; however, itwas an alien practice to most of our community-based teacher group, many ofwhom were educated in more traditional education educational systems. Anability to ‘stand outside’ of your work, reflect upon it and view its value objectively as an open resource for others to use and adapt, is essential in effectiveOER sharing.In order to feel comfortable with working openly, neutral environmentsare necessary to enable cross-linguistic, cross-cultural sharing to take place.It became clear during café sessions that sharing of ideas and practice doeshappen within linguistic and cultural groups offline but there is very littlecross-linguistic and cross-cultural sharing taking place. Online repositoriesoffer a neutra
community-based language teachers Journal of e-Learning and Knowledge Society Vol. 9, n. 1, January 2013 (pp. 73 - 83) ISSN: 1826-6223 eISSN: 1971-8829 Kate Borthwick, Alison Dickens University of Southampton, UK Peer Reviewed Papers The Community Café project ran from 2010 – 2011 and was a collaboration between Southampton City Council and two universities in the UK. The project’s aim .
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